QuickBooks Time vs TradesTimer
What QuickBooks Time is
Cloud-based employee time tracking inside the QuickBooks ecosystem, built for crews with payroll workflows.
Best for: Construction companies with 10+ employees already using QuickBooks Online for payroll and invoicing, where payroll sync is the main value.
Pricing at a glance
$20 PER USER / MO (MIN)
Base plan $20/month plus $10 per user; higher tiers add scheduling and geofencing at extra per-user cost.
Verified 2026-04-15
$0 FREE — FULL APP
Where QuickBooks Time is strong
- Deep integration with QuickBooks Online payroll
- Crew scheduling and shift trade features
- GPS geofences that auto-clock employees in and out
Where QuickBooks Time falls short for trades
- Per-user pricing is punishing for solo operators — you pay the same seat fee as a 50-person crew
- Geofences must be drawn around every jobsite in advance, which defeats the purpose for trades who visit 5-8 new addresses a day
- Requires employees to clock in and clock out, even when the operator is a sole proprietor
- Location data is stored on Intuit's servers, not on your device
QuickBooks Time problems, in users' own words
These aren't our words — they're from public threads written by people using QuickBooks Time (or shopping for a way out). Each quote links to the original discussion.
We have crews working on multiple job sites, often with staggered start/end times, and it’s getting harder to stay on top of hours, breaks, and overtime … I’ve looked at TSheets, Raken, and ClockShark.
TSheets is QuickBooks Time's old name. Staggered multi-site days are exactly where clock-in/clock-out models leak hours — which is why TradesTimer records the day passively instead of asking anyone to remember.
They are not receiving an invite to quickbooks time and they are not able to see the schedule or clock in/out. Checked spam folders and junk folders.
In an invite-and-admin system, hours can't even exist until the office plumbing works. A tracker with no accounts has no invites to go missing.
Why I built a QuickBooks Time alternative
I ran time tracking (plus orders, parts, and invoicing) from the back office of an electrical contractor with about ten guys on the road. Clock-in systems fail the same three ways everywhere: someone forgets to clock in and you rebuild his morning from memory; someone clocks into the wrong job and the wrong customer nearly gets billed; or the office hasn't set up the job number yet, so the hours have nowhere to land. We had a full-time person — me — catching those. A solo operator has nobody.
QuickBooks Time is built for that shop I worked in — payroll sync, crew scheduling, an admin watching the timesheets. If that's you, it's a fine tool. If you're one tradesman invoicing your own hours, you're paying per-user prices to run a system whose whole design assumes an office that you don't have. TradesTimer replaces the ritual, not the office: the day records itself, and you name the jobs after the fact — no PO required before your hours can exist.
What TradesTimer does differently
- The full time-tracking app is free — no trial, no feature gate, no ads
- No jobsites to set up — stops are detected automatically as they happen
- Location history stays on your phone; no cloud account required
- No clock-in ritual — the timer is the day itself
- No cloud account required — your location history stays on your device
The verdict
QuickBooks Time is the right pick if you already run payroll through QuickBooks Online and have employees to manage, and the $20+ per user per month fee is a rounding error against your payroll. TradesTimer is the right pick if you are a solo tradesperson or a crew of 2–3 who just wants billable hours reconstructed at the end of the day — the core app is free and there are no per-user fees or pre-defined jobsites to maintain.
Page last verified 2026-04-15. If QuickBooks Time has changed pricing or features since then and this page is stale, email support@tradestimer.com and we'll fix it.
Free. The whole app.
The whole time-tracking app is free — no trial, no feature gate, no ads, no per-user fees. (Encrypted cloud backup is on the roadmap.)
- Automatic day reconstruction from background GPS
- Unlimited stops, drives, and days
- Review and edit any block
- Rounded billable-hours summary, shareable as plain text
- Automatic mileage log, exportable for taxes
- 7-day summary view
- All location data stays on your device
Your location history stays on your phone.
There is no TradesTimer server storing your location trails. No account. No sign-up. Your GPS history lives on the device that recorded it — for as long as you want it. The only time anything leaves your phone is when you choose to share your billable-hours summary yourself.
The app does not talk to any third-party service with your location. Nothing about where you've been is uploaded anywhere. See the privacy policy for the full detail.